Using Page's cumulative sum test on MODIS time series to detect land-cover changes

Abstract:

Human settlement expansion is one of the most
pervasive forms of land cover change in South Africa. The use
of Page’s Cumulative Sum Test is proposed as a method to
detect new settlement developments in areas that were previously
covered by natural vegetation using 500 m MODIS time series
satellite data. The method is a sequential per pixel change alarm
algorithm that can take into account positive detection delay,
probability of detection and false alarm probability to construct
a threshold. Simulated change data was generated to determine a
threshold during a preliminary off-line optimization phase. After
optimization the method was evaluated on examples of known
land cover change in the Gauteng and Limpopo provinces of
South Africa. The experimental results indicated that CUSUM
performs better than band differencing in the before mentioned
study areas.